Just another Daily News site

Main menu

Post navigation

I heard some sad news tonight. Jerry Bobrow, who ran a top test prep company and was a friend to Birmingham sports and countless other athletes in the Valley –including this reporter, way back when — passed away on Nov. 12 after a long bout with cancer.

Birmingham administrator Fern Somoza passed along the sad news. Bobrow, she said, has helped a number of Birmingham students and athletes over the years who wanted to go to college, but couldn’t afford all the high-priced test prep. One athlete he helped, is expected to attend Harvard next year.

“He was a wonderful man,” Somoza said. “We’re all really going to miss him. He’s done so much for so many people.”

This week’s 60-0 victory over Kennedy was actually sort of close for a little while. It was only 14-0 midway through the second quarter. But it was a subdued kind of feel out on the sidelines tonight. Last week against Taft, the guys from Birmingham were able to get up for their league rival, but after six straight blowouts, it does get a little old.

Coach Croson always seems to find a new way of motivating the troops. Sometimes, he talks to them about “being great” everytime they step on the field, sometimes, he can use a Homecoming game or Senior Night to pump them up. This week, he constantly reminded the guys that “this is the playoffs” and no team good enough to make it is going to roll over and quit just because they’re down three touchdowns. That worked for a while, but by the fourth quarter, it was all about cheering for the back-ups and JV call-ups who were getting in the game for the first time.

I could tell the Birmingham coaches had mixed emotions about laying 60 on Kennedy. The Patriots staff is close with Kennedy coach Dion Lambert and has a lot of respect for him. To Kennedy’s credit, they never stopped playing. RB Matt Gentle stayed in the whole game and kept running hard until the end.

OK, so I finally put some of my Stanford education to work tonight. Well, just that one web design class I took, I guess. But I went through and added in all the stories that have run in this fall’s series, so if you’ve just come across the project, you can go back through and get caught up.

Thanks to the guys in new media for making sure the stories will be available for the next six months online. Normally they expire after two weeks, but we decided to let these live a little longer.

When I started out reporting for this week’s story on Birmingham’s assistant coaches, I asked head coach Ed Croson for a brief description of each of his guys. When we got to defensive line coach Floyd Peterson, Croson said simply, “He’s the ghost.”

When practice is over, Peterson is gone. Where he goes, nobody knows. It’s kind of a running joke amongst the guys.

And if you try calling him on his cell phone, you’ll get a gruff voice delivering this message: “I’m not here. Leave a message and I’ll call you back if I feel like it.”

It’s all good natured ribbing of course. Because Peterson’s contributions to the team are huge. He’s been with Croson the longest of any other assistant and even coached a few years in college, so he’s got a ton of experience.

OK, before the 1-9 season, back when Weis was still thought of as an offensive genius. Forget it, maybe I should’ve said Norm Chow. Anyway…

Every program has one. The quiet coach who is content to sit in the booth, calls plays and let everyone else take the credit even though he’s a genius X’s and O’s guy. At Birmingham, that guy is offensive coordinator Jim Thornton. He drives in from Simi Valley every day, sits in the booth and hardly says a word, but according to all the other assistants, and coach Croson, he’s one of the power brains behind the whole operation.

“He’s our Charlie Weis,” assistant Kevin Thomas said. “He’s just a football nut. He’s been doing it his whole life. He’s great at breaking down film, doing the X’s and O’s kind of stuff.”

Not counting the late Friday night which always tends to stretch into the early morning hours of Saturday, It starts about 9 a.m. The coaches meet the players at 10 to watch the game tape from the previous night. The coaches have already watched and analyzed the tape, late Friday night.

After tape, everyone gets a lift in, just to help work out the soreness from the night before.

Around noon, the coaches all head over to defensive coordinator Jim Rose’s house. It’s a bachelor pad of the highest order, with big-screen TVs in each room and tons of comfortable couches and bean bag chairs. For the next six to 10 hours, the coaches break down film on next week’s opponents. Offense in one room, defense in the other. Each game tape is watched about 2-3 times, then charted.

Later, game plans and schemes are developed to present to the players on Monday.

Birmingham defensive ends Malik and Marquis Jackson have developed into two of the most dominant defensive players in the region this year, but they didn’t look like much when they first showed up at the school as sophomores.

“They wanted to play linebacker,” assistant coach Kevin Thomas said.

Neither were getting much playing time in Birmingham’s experienced linebacking core, so Thomas asked Marquis if he wanted to try his hand on the defensive line, where there were a few openings.

“We tried Marquis out on the line at the Occidental camp, in a game against Bakersfield, who was ranked like No. 9 in the state at the time, and just dominated,” Thomas said. “He was so good, I was like, `You’re starting. Right now, you’re a starter.’ Even though he was just this little sophomore.

“A few weeks later, Malik came up to me and was like, `Coach, you think I could try defensive line too?’ That’s how it started.”

It was no accident that quarterback Exavier Johnson took off on an 18-yard run to open Friday’s game against Taft. The Birmingham coaches –head coach Ed Croson and offensive coordinator Jim Thornton — purposely called for Johnson to run on the first play so he’d get any extra energy/aggressiveness out right away. Johnson was the quarterback at Taft for two seasons before transferring to Birmingham.

“That was a good idea coach Thornton had,” Croson said. “Ex was pretty pumped up so it was good for him to take off, hit someone and get some of that out right away.”

Wow, I had to do a double-take when I walked up to practice today. The team grew from 62 to 90-something over the weekend as coach Croson called up players from the junior varsity in anticipation of the playoffs. It’s always fun when the younger kids get to line up against the big guys on the teams. On a typical Monday, practice can be a little ragged as everyone shakes out the cobwebs from the weekend, but with the new JV call-ups, there was a lot of intensity today.

Most of the guys will never see the playing field, but it’s a really good experience for them to get a taste of the big-boy game and playoff atmosphere, which begins, this week with the annual showdown against West Valley League rival Taft. It’s great when this game falls on the last week of the regular season. Both teams have been building towards this all season and the league title is on the line. Last year, it just felt silly to play the big game in Week 6, but this year, the rotation is back the way it belongs.

A bunch of the guys took their SATs on Saturday morning, at 8 a.m. Friday’s game didn’t end until 9:45 at night, and most of the players didn’t make it home until 10:30 or 11 so it was a pretty quick turnaround.

I asked Malik Jackson how it went.

“I think I did pretty good,” he said. “But kind of boring. It’s like four hours long. ”